Related papers: Objective Bayesian Statistics
We address the problem of reconstructing quantum theory from the perspective of an agent who makes bets about the outcomes of possible experiments. We build a general Bayesian framework that can be used to organize the agent's beliefs and…
Hypothesis testing and model choice are quintessential questions for statistical inference and while the Bayesian paradigm seems ideally suited for answering these questions, it faces difficulties of its own ranging from prior modelling to…
When a mathematical or computational model is used to analyse some system, it is usual that some parameters resp.\ functions or fields in the model are not known, and hence uncertain. These parametric quantities are then identified by…
The application of Bayesian methods in cosmology and astrophysics has flourished over the past decade, spurred by data sets of increasing size and complexity. In many respects, Bayesian methods have proven to be vastly superior to more…
We study the convergence rates of empirical Bayes posterior distributions for nonparametric and high-dimensional inference. We show that as long as the hyperparameter set is discrete, the empirical Bayes posterior distribution induced by…
Modern applications routinely collect high-dimensional data, leading to statistical models having more parameters than there are samples available. A common solution is to impose sparsity in parameter estimation, often using penalized…
A nonparametric Bayesian approach is developed to determine quantum potentials from empirical data for quantum systems at finite temperature. The approach combines the likelihood model of quantum mechanics with a priori information over…
Selection bias arises when the probability that an observation enters a dataset depends on variables related to the quantities of interest, leading to systematic distortions in estimation and uncertainty quantification. For example, in…
Across the empirical sciences, few statistical procedures rival the popularity of the frequentist t-test. In contrast, the Bayesian versions of the t-test have languished in obscurity. In recent years, however, the theoretical and practical…
Equivariant models leverage prior knowledge on symmetries to improve predictive performance, but misspecified architectural constraints can harm it instead. While work has explored learning or relaxing constraints, selecting among…
Bayesian model comparison (BMC) offers a principled probabilistic approach to study and rank competing models. In standard BMC, we construct a discrete probability distribution over the set of possible models, conditional on the observed…
This perspective chapter briefly surveys: (1) past growth in the use of Bayesian methods in astrophysics; (2) current misconceptions about both frequentist and Bayesian statistical inference that hinder wider adoption of Bayesian methods by…
This paper offers a qualitative insight into the convergence of Bayesian parameter inference in a setup which mimics the modeling of the spread of a disease with associated disease measurements. Specifically, we are interested in the…
Especially when facing reliability data with limited information (e.g., a small number of failures), there are strong motivations for using Bayesian inference methods. These include the option to use information from physics-of-failure or…
Many probabilistic programming languages allow programs to be run under constraints in order to carry out Bayesian inference. Running programs under constraints could enable other uses such as rare event simulation and probabilistic…
We study the stability of posterior predictive inferences to the specification of the likelihood model and perturbations of the data generating process. In modern big data analyses, useful broad structural judgements may be elicited from…
Implementing Bayesian inference is often computationally challenging in applications involving complex models, and sometimes calculating the likelihood itself is difficult. Synthetic likelihood is one approach for carrying out inference…
We formalize the idea of probability distributions that lead to reliable predictions about some, but not all aspects of a domain. The resulting notion of `safety' provides a fresh perspective on foundational issues in statistics, providing…
The problem of assigning probabilities when little is known is analized in the case where the quanities of interest are physical observables, i.e. can be measured and their values expressed by numbers. It is pointed out that the assignment…
When do nonparametric Bayesian procedures ``overfit''? To shed light on this question, we consider a binary regression problem in detail and establish frequentist consistency for a certain class of Bayes procedures based on hierarchical…